The Collapse of Religion in 21st Century America

This century has seen a dramatic collapse in religious practice, including Catholicism, in America. What is causing so many people to lose their faith?

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Crisis Point
The Collapse of Religion in 21st Century America
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Guest

Stephen Bullivant holds professorial positions at St Mary’s University, London, and the University of Notre Dame, Sydney. He has doctorates in theology (Oxford, 2009) and sociology (Warwick, 2019). His studies of contemporary nonreligiosity have received wide international coverage, including from the BBC, New York Times, Economist, Financial Times, and Der Spiegel. He is the author of “Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II” and most recently, “Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America.”

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Transcript

Eric Sammons:

This century has seen a dramatic collapse in religion, including in Catholicism here in America. What is causing so many people to lose their faith? We’re going to talk to an expert in the field about this on today’s podcast.

Hello, I’m Eric Sammons, your host and editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine. Before we get started, I just want to encourage people to smash that like button and subscribe to the channel. Also, you can follow us on social media at Crisis Mag.

Actually before I go too much further, this month we’re doing our twice a year fundraising, so go to crisismagazine.com/donate. I’d forgotten I was going to say that. That’s why I wasn’t prepared for it.

Anyway, our guest today is Stephen Bullivant. He holds professional positions at St. Mary’s University London and the University of Notre Dame Sydney. He has doctorates in theology and sociology. His studies of contemporary non-religiosity have received wide international coverage, including from the BBC, The New York Times, The Economist, Financial Times, and Der Spiegel.

He’s the author of Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America Since Vatican II. A very excellent book, and also, most recently, I have it right here, Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America. Welcome to the program, Steven.

Stephen Bullivant:

Well, thank you for having me. Delighted to be on.

Eric Sammons:

Yeah, this is a topic that I have been very interested in, followed for a very long time, and I find your work to be excellent. I was director of evangelization for five years for a diocese. I worked, I was head of evangelization for a parish for a number of years before that.

I’ve always been interested in like, okay, why are people leaving? How can we get them to come back? I feel like your work is really helping us to establish a lot of the reasons why people are leaving hopefully so they will come back.

What I want to start with is I’m just going to show some charts, and for those who are listening, I will describe them because I think I want to set the table here for what we’re talking about.

Okay, so the first chart, let me pull up here, is from your book. It’s the proportions of all US adults, US adults under 30 with no religious affiliation over time. For those who can’t see this, basically what happens is you see from 1972 to about 1992, it’s pretty steady. You’re in … For all adults, it’s around the five to 8% range. For younger, under 30 adults, it’s maybe 10 to 15% range.

That’s pretty steady between ’72 to ’92, but then you start to see an increase. Again, this is religious, no … People with no religious affiliation, so from our perspective, this is a bad thing for this to go up. It goes up until it’s at 23% in 2018 for all adults and 34% for adults under 30 in 2018. We see this increase in no religious affiliation.

I want to show you … The next chart is going to be just church membership. This is from Gallup and it’s similar numbers. It goes back a little bit deeper. It goes back to early 1930s. The question is simply do you happen to be a member of a church, synagogue, or mosque? Again, they call it church membership, obviously, synagogue or mosques, so religious membership. What we see is from late 1930s to about the mid, late 1990s, we again see a relatively steady number. It’s 73% in the late 1930s. It’s 70% in the mid, late 1990s. Again, steady.

But then, from around 2000 until today, it just collapses. All of a sudden you go from 70% right before 2000, and 2020, I think it was actually 2019, I can’t remember now, it’s 47%. It’s under 50% for the first time in US history of people who say, “I am a member of a church, synagogue, or mosque,” which is a little bit different than the religious affiliation question, but very similar.

Stephen Bullivant:

It’s kind of a harder measure as well. I mean, this is an actual member of … You have a proper community rather than you just kind of tick a box, right? This is an even more striking …

Eric Sammons:

Yes, absolutely. Good point. Yeah, this is somebody who says, “Yeah, I’m actually a member. I’m in the roles and I’m willing to admit it publicly.” It’s a huge collapse, though, from around 2000 to today.

Then, because most of our audience is Catholic, let me look at, show a few Catholic numbers. I believe this is from … Yeah, this is from CARA, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate from Georgetown University. This is weekly mass attending US Catholics from 1970 to today. Again, we see it’s a drop definitely from 1970 to around 2000. Though, there’s a little bit of a tick of an increase between 1995 and 2000. But, again, from 2000 until today, we see a huge drop in people who say they attend mass weekly.

I think the way they word this, they just simply say, “How often do you attend mass?” One of the options is simply weekly. Again, I believe this … I should have had this on the chart, but I think this is from CARA.

Then the final chart is one of my favorites, and I mean that in a very disturbing sense, because I think it shows something very dramatic. This is again from CARA. This is infant baptisms in the United States, Catholic infant baptisms.

I always feel like this is one of the most important numbers because I feel like infant baptism represents kind of like, do you really believe in what this church is saying? Because, first of all, you’re having kids and you’re baptizing them. Because you don’t baptize them, your kids, you’re not even doing kind of the minimal that we would say means like, okay, I take my faith at least minimally seriously, because even people who don’t attend mass twice a year often baptize their kids.

What we see is there’s a drop, pretty significant drop, from 1970, 1975, and then a general kind of steady increase. Of course, remember, this is total number, which means immigration, people coming in. Things like that affects it. Really, the fact that it increases a little bit from 1975 to 2000 isn’t that great of a sign, but it stays relatively steady.

Then from 2000 until 2019, a collapse of 41.5% decrease in the number of infant baptisms that have occurred in America since the year 2000.

I am setting up a very depressing scene. To be honest, in reading your book Nonverts, I found it excellent, but I also found it very discouraging and somewhat depressing even. Sorry.

I guess I just have to ask in 30 seconds or less what happened? No, I’m just kidding, but, seriously, what would you say just on a very high level has occurred? I specifically want to focus in the decrease since this century, since late nineties, early 2000’s.

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah, yeah.

Eric Sammons:

What would you say are the major factors that have caused this collapse of religion, including Catholicism, in America?

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah. Well, I think there’s two … There’s a long story and a short story, right? In a sense, I think what we’re seeing in those and … That, I mean, the baptism chart is maybe the starkest there, because you’re right that there’s a lot of people who have never practiced since their own baptism who still get their kids baptized for family, ethnic, cultural. All sorts of rite of passage reasons.

When that’s gone, that’s really shows … In the same way that the ticking the box does. There’s a sense in which these are the last things to go. In a sense, those things only go at the tail end of a couple of generations of decline. There was this period in the eighties, nineties I think when church leaders, we could kind of comfort each other by saying, “Yeah, people don’t go to mass like they used to, but once a Catholic, always a Catholic. You scratch the surface and these people are really Catholic.”

You often heard it said, at least from bishops, that being a devout Catholic doesn’t mean something different now, so you don’t have to be there every week to still be a good Catholic. You kind of get this kind of changing of the benchmark, right? Actually now we’re beginning to see that that’s a transitional phase of a waning generation. Okay? That doesn’t keep going forever because how can it? It doesn’t mean anything for the third, fourth generation.

So, there’s this kind of long story that you can either state after the second World War, which in Mass Exodus I kind of do that. Then things come to a head in the sixties, partly because the baby boomers are coming of age at a time when everything’s changing, including in the church. It’s from the 1960s when we start seeing church going falling, so people are still identifying, people are still often being church members, but they’re going less and less often.

If you look at, again, as you rightly point out, immigration plays in … Is a countereffect. There’s all sorts of stuff going on in any one place, but certainly a good portion of Catholicism. Also, the mainline churches from the seventies, eighties, weekly church attendance is going down and down and down.

Then by the time you get to the late nineties, and then this is the short story is you’ve got this generation, the millennials, who have been raised in a much less religious world to their parents and grandparents, are much less likely to have been raised in any kind of seriously religious way. Obviously that’s going to look very different depending on your family, where you are. All kinds of factors, if you’re evangelical or if you’re Mormon or if you’re Catholic, if you mainline.

Nevertheless, there’s a much bigger pool of people who have had a pretty weak religious upbringing, and they’re coming of age at a time the Internet’s changing things. Less so for Catholics, I think, but also for evangelicals, Mormons. That’s a much bigger thing.

It’s a time when after the Berlin War comes down, after the end of communism, you had this kind of generation of people who were no longer raised with this Christian America versus Godless communism mood music. It’s a time when the big existential threat to the country isn’t people with no religion, it’s people with too much religion. Okay? You’ve got rise of Islam is terrorism. Obviously 911 is the most obvious landmark in that, but that doesn’t just begin in 2001.

It’s a lot of things all coming together at once on particularly the millennial generation. It’s striking that first chart you showed, that it’s … The under 35s are kind of always the vanguard. It’s precisely that you’ve got this kind of waned religiosity of a whole generation and then various things kind of playing into that.

Then suddenly you start getting headlines that say “Nones on the Rise” and then people start thinking, “Oh, I guess I’m one of those.” The next time there’s a survey, more people tick the box, and then it kind of becomes this snowballing effect.

Eric Sammons:

Yeah. Would it be fair to categorize it like this, from the mid 1960s or so, maybe even a little bit earlier, until the mid 1990s, late 1990s, what we see is a weakening where people are still identifying as I am Catholic, I am a Methodist, or whatever the case may be, but there’s a weakening in actual practice and maybe even belief?

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Eric Sammons:

Then from the late nineties till today, both them and their kids are starting to say, “I don’t really even need to say I’m part of this religion anymore because I really don’t believe it.” Is that kind of a fair, very general, very broad way to describe it?

Stephen Bullivant:

I think that’s basically it. Also, you’ve got this generational thing. For those people, and those people are the ones who aren’t getting their kids baptized after 2000.

What they don’t have but their parents had was religiously practicing parents kind of breathing down their neck, right? You say, “Of course you’re getting them baptized.” That’s now, what? Two generations, if not three generations, back.

They might have been baptized because of the grandma would’ve … It would’ve been a thing, but for their parents it … Who cares? You do you kind of thing.

Absolutely. It’s that kind of, as I say, it’s the fruits of two, three generations of this kind of hollowing out, if you like, of American Christianity.

Eric Sammons:

Yeah. I feel like that’s been my experience just anecdotally in that, okay, I’m in my fifties. What I’ve noticed is my parents’ generation, they were practicing. I grew up Methodist, but I’m talking about both my parents, my wife’s parents, Catholic, protestant, whatever. They identified as their religion. Then, my generation much less so. They identified as it, but they didn’t practice I guess the best way to put it.

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah.

Eric Sammons:

Then my kids’ generation, they’re just … Fortunately not my kids right yet, or hopefully never, but they just simply are like, “It’s not worth the point.”

Now, I know from a Catholic perspective, when I was first looking into this information myself, looking at these numbers, I at first only saw the Catholic numbers. I was like, “It’s a Catholic thing,” especially that infant baptism. When I saw those numbers, my first in instinct was, “Well, Vatican II. All the changes. All that.”

Then when I looked more into it, I was like, “Oh, wait a second. Every religion in America is dropping at very similar rates, very similar timeframes.” So, we can’t really …

I do want to talk about Vatican II in a little bit because your book, Mass Exodus, talks about it, but what we then say were those factors that caused basically Americans to lose their religion. You mentioned World War II after that and things like that, but what were the actual things? Was it the sexual revolution? Move to the suburbs? I mean, what were the main factors that caused this?

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah, I think certainly the … It’s that post … I talk in Mass Exodus about the baby boomers are more sinned against than sinning in this because they’re the generation that are brought up very differently to how their parents were.

The Catholics are quite a good case of this, but it’s true of others. If you were raised before the war, you were raised often in kind of a neighborhood where everyone you lived with was some other kind of … Not just Catholic, but Irish Catholic or Polish Catholic or Jewish. You have these, the classic inner city kind of ghettos.

Then after the War, A, there’s quite a lot of mixing that happens with the war. Just people … If you were raised in small town Kansas, and you only know people in small town Kansas, then you go off to fight or you go off to whatever, and then you get … The GI Bill means that you then go off to college and then you move out of state. There’s all sorts of things going down that kind of break down these kind of communities.

Your kids are far more likely to be raised in the suburbs, far less likely to be raised in these kind of very close enclaves. Because there’s so many of them, they’re called the baby boomers because there was a very low fertility rate because of the depression and then the second World War for a long period. There weren’t many older kids, and then suddenly there’s loads of kids.

They’re always going to come of age in an interesting way, right? You can see this. By the fifties, there’s all this kind of concerned mystified commentary from their parents’ generation trying to understand these teen ages. Also, you’re beginning to see concerns expressed by churches that were losing the youth.

Then, the 1960s just happened. There’s a big kind of anti-authoritarian thing that happened in the sixties, especially around Vietnam. There’s the sexual revolution, which in all sorts of ways impacts upon the churches, partly because the arguments over contraception had happened in the thirties. In a sense, the Catholic church becomes controversial for being the only one left standing almost in American Catholicism, right?

Eric Sammons:

Right.

Stephen Bullivant:

There’s a whole story to talk about why every other denomination change its teaching in the thirties and forties, and it is mainly about eugenics, actually, but that’s a whole other story to talk about.

Then everything else comes along. What we see after that in the churches is that either people think, “Well, the churches are at odds,” whether this is gender roles, whether this is divorce, whether this is abortion, whether it’s contraception, that the churches are increasingly either at odds with what are thought to be mainstream normal values, the kind of mainstream American cultural values and norms, or you get this kind of arguments within the churches. You see this particularly in the mainline churches, which then rip themselves apart either trying to accommodate the new views or trying to stand up for the old ways.

There’s no easy way to do this. There’s this kind of fracturing of the churches into the seventies, eighties. It’s not just a Catholic thing, but there’s all sorts of weird liturgical experimentation that goes on. We know the Catholic story here, but you get the very similar sorts of … If you read what reform and liberal Jewish synagogues were doing to try and keep the youth, and it was Peter, Paul, and Mary songs at Synagogue on Shabbat and things like that, right?

Eric Sammons:

Man, they had to go through that too? Oh, bless them.

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah. All exactly the same things that are happening in the Episcopalian churches and the Methodist churches and that kind of stuff. You’re getting this whole … And none of it works, right? This whole desperate attempt to keep the youth.

Meanwhile, you’ve got these young people … Again, this is a generation far less likely to live near the extended family certainly than their parents, and even more so their grandparents. Far more likely to have mixed marriages and going to be that much removed once again from these kind of small, either small town or small inner city enclaves, where one’s social life was basically your church. It was built around the church.

Now, the megachurches come into that void and specifically aim themselves at people living in the … Families in the suburbs who don’t go to church anymore but kind of have a guilty conscience about it. Don’t really like churchy things, but feel like it’s a good thing to do.

You kind of create a church that doesn’t look like a church, that has excellent parking, but then kind of builds the social life around the church in the way that the old inner city churches did naturally. The megachurch is kind of constructed artificially, and there’s a market for that. That’s where you see … So, that kind of works, but it’s working in this kind of changed situation. There’s a lot of stuff going on.

Eric Sammons:

Right.

Stephen Bullivant:

Any one year doesn’t look like a crisis. I think this is a critical thing is that any one year, some people have come, some people have gone. We look about, maybe we’ve down a few, but that could be … That’s just ordinary fluctuation, but it’s that kind of losing 1% every year for 40 years.

Eric Sammons:

Right.

Stephen Bullivant:

It’s that kind of thing. There was never any one year when it collapsed, so you could always just about feel that business as usual. I’m sure once we instigate this new scheme or we try the vigil mass, or we get the new youth minister or we do something, then we’ll be back on the steady or the up curve again. It just never … Nothing worked

Eric Sammons:

Yeah. Nothing did work. I remember when I became Catholic in the early 1990s, there was a turn here in America of, among Catholics like, “Okay, we’re moving away from the silly seventies and the eighties where we did all this weird stuff and the weird liturgies, the weird catechism and all that stuff, and now we’re going to be more orthodox, more JP II.”

Sure enough, you saw where the number of converts each year was like 150,000. A very impressive number each year.

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah, yeah.

Eric Sammons:

Now, of course we didn’t talk about the fact that there was also a bunch of people leaving out the door, but the fact is there were a lot of people coming in. I know a lot of us, I know I felt like this, and a lot of us thought, “Okay, we’ve turned the corner and now the 21st century, we’re going to see things turn around, because we’re embracing a JP II orthodoxy, we’re done with the experimentation.” But of course, that’s not at all what happened. You can’t say, for those who might jump and say, “Well, how about Pope Francis?” Well, from the 1990s to Pope Francis is still about 20 years, and it just didn’t happen. We saw the decrease happen, the collapse starts 13, 15 years before Pope Francis becomes pope, so you can’t … I’m not defending him, but at the same time you can’t point it at him. He’s a bishop in Argentina at this point.

So my question is what happened in the ’90s that really led to where this weakening turned into a complete collapse, even among … Because I remember there was books written about, “Oh, what we need to do is just, as long as we embrace orthodoxy …” I mean that in the small-O, Catholics saying that, evangelicals saying that. Embrace this, then things will turn around, because by embracing the world for the past 30 years everybody left. Now if we embrace … There were certain signs that this was true, but yet that’s not at all what happened. Is it because we didn’t embrace orthodoxy? Or was there just so many factors that it was just like trying to put your finger in the crack in the dam?

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah. I think basically in any one moment, in any one community, in any parish, but obviously you can extend that over a whole country, there’s all sorts of different factors coming into play. Immigration, the inflows or outflows according to where the jobs are is always the big thing, the birth rate. The Catholic birth rate, the national birth rate as a whole goes down, which is a big factor, a huge factor. If you’ve got all the people dying off, and given that there was a massive birth rate with the ’60s, well, the Boomers, and then birth rates really plummeted, that’s going to have an effect in obviously this. It’s going to have an effect for the next 60, 70, 80 years.

So you’re playing with these kinds of effects, you’re playing with this kind of transmission factor and it becomes more and more an uphill struggle for kids raised as an X, to remain as an X into adulthood, to then be a practicing X for their kids to then be raised as an X to continue the process. Actually, I think that JP II generation and the Benedict thing was exactly the right sort of thing. You have to look at where is the young people, where is the vitality? Where are the Millennials who were still in church and their kids are in church? Well, actually that’s them. But they’re not outweighing everything else. So it’s not that that didn’t work, it’s that that almost could never have been a big enough phenomenon to outweigh the slow train coming down the tracks. Yeah.

Eric Sammons:

We have a tsunami coming and we can get a few people on the boat to get out of the way, but you’re not stopping the tsunami.

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah, but literally if you talk to, if you go and meet 20-somethings, 30-somethings who are still at mass on a Sunday, and again, depending on where you are in the country, that’s going to be a very different kind of dynamic. It’s going to be very different in rural Louisiana to Portland, Oregon. Just to name two places where I did field work. But generally speaking, and it’s even more the case in Britain, so it really is the case. If you’re in your late teens, 20s, 30s in Britain and you’re still going to not just Catholic Church, but any kind of church, you’ve really had to swim against that tide. You’d have to argue not only with your friends and probably family members, but with a good part of yourself as to why you were there, why you were still there. What does it mean to you? Does it make sense? After all the scandals, why?

Which means that the ones who are there have to own and have to be there. Whenever I meet, and maybe the ones I meet are the … Actually, I don’t think that’s true, because certainly the ones you ever meet in a church context have to be the survivors, if you like. If you talk to those, then it’s going to be this JP II, not the only reasons, but that’s going to be a big dose of who’s there and why. It’s going to be converts and it’s going to be evangelical, ex-evangelical converts, because that’s a big part of the American sea. People like Brandon Vogt or Scott Hahn, or that whole world of lay-Catholic influencers, because there were influencers, leaders. They’ve come out of that kind of very deeply Christo-centric, Biblio-centric world, and that’s part of how they’ve managed to keep the faith, but then feel this need to give it to others. Which again, in the Catholic Church and the mainline churches particularly, that evangelical zeal really waned.

Eric Sammons:

So in a sense, it’s not the JP II Catholics, especially in the 1990s, early 2000s, where you see a lot of people coming to church, you see Catholics, Crato Catholics who are energized for the faith, it’s not that those efforts didn’t work, it’s just that statistically they get overwhelmed, so to speak. If that hadn’t happened, then it’d even be worse today. Is that what you’re saying?

Stephen Bullivant:

Then who would be there?

Eric Sammons:

Right.

Stephen Bullivant:

It’s not that there wouldn’t be anyone, there’d still be immigrants, first, second generation immigrants, which has always been the case with Catholic parishes in Britain and America for centuries. There’s always, it’s a big country, there’s millions of people, there’s always going to be some, but that age profile would be even more skewed to the older generations have it not been for that kind of trend. There are different strengths to that trend, there’s a kind of very liturgically traditional strand, but there’s also a more Charismatic, worship music, evangelical strand. Actually, those kinds of folks get on very well and are quite happy with either, in either world often. It’s not just one thing, is what I’m saying. There’s different streams that are playing into that.

Eric Sammons:

Yeah. I’ve experienced that in my own life. When I became Catholic, it was through the influence of Charismatic Catholics, and I had a lot of interaction with them through Francis University of Steubenville. But then over the past 10 years, so I’ve been much more in the traditional Catholic camp, but I always feel like we’re allies, uneasy at times. But when you compare us to everybody else, we’re the ones that are trying to keep the faith and pass it onto our kids. That’s what combines. One thing I’ve really come to believe is a major influence in the collapse of religion over the past 20, 30 years, and I was very happy to see that I might actually be right on this, because you mentioned it in your book, which is the rise of the internet.

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah.

Eric Sammons:

That we see in the mid 1990s the explosion of the internet as a thing. People who know, know the internet existed since the ’60s, but as a thing that the average person got onto, could interact with other people. I’m convinced that has caused a major shift and has helped accelerate, I should say, the decline of religion. Can you speak to that, because you talk about it in the book Nonverts, how has the internet impacted, the rise of the internet impacted the decline of religion, at least in America?

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah. So I think it’s most obvious, because the book Nonverts it’s trying to tell a big picture national story with individual narratives, but it’s also trying to tell this middle meso-level in the job and story about how this plays out in different denominational sub-worlds. This is most evident, and so the classic example of this are ex-Mormons and ex-evangelicals, especially ex-Mormons. So if you’ve been raised small town Utah, small town Idaho, rural southern Idaho where everyone you know is some kind of Mormon, and everything you … While everyone else was losing the young people, there’s whole books written about Mormon envy of evangelicals.

Eric Sammons:

I remember that.

Stephen Bullivant:

There’s a lot of stuff that we wouldn’t want to copy, right? But hey, they do great with young adults, they do great with commitment, they do great with big families who are at church. So if you’re raised in that world and you have doubts or you have all sorts of questions or whatever, or there’s all sorts of reasons that people might lose their faith or go through traumatic things. Before the internet comes along, you don’t really have avenues for exploring that or knowing other people who just aren’t Mormon.

If you’re raised in rural Utah and you leave the church, you leave rural Utah. So there might be someone’s cousin who you don’t hear from anymore, but you’re not in contact. Now, once the internet comes along, first of all you’re exposed to a much broader range of people and you can form friendships. You form friendships around, you could be in a group of something around the music of Bob Dylan or something, but it’s a much more mixed world and you can get friendships. You’re exposed to a much bigger world and worldviews. But also, there’s this opportunity to find ex-Mormons or for that cousin to tell you the real reason why they left, and to say, “Hey, I came across this, they never taught us this in Sunday school.”

So particularly for those Mormons, ex-Mormons, these Nonverts, the internet was just this huge thing. Evangelicals too, to an extent. It just gave them access to a different world. Now, for some people, including … Actually, I was too early for this to have any major role in my conversion, because I’m a convert too, but now obviously it’s possible to find, if you’re raised as an atheist or an anything, there are all sorts of weird workings of problems to then find yourself falling into a Catholic sub-world online and becoming a Catholic. You see this on Twitch all the time.

I’ve got an ex-colleague who he was an evangelical Anglican and used to, he’s a philosopher, used to have William Lane Craig videos just playing in the background on YouTube while he was working in his office. The algorithm started serving up Bishop Barron videos, and overtime he started seeking these out, and then he became Catholic. So all those sorts of ways in which the internet allows you to be exposed to other things that you might not otherwise have been exposed to, or it allows you to go really double down into something. If you find your tribe online, and I’ve done this in different, I mentioned Bob Dylan, different fandoms, you can get really into things.

Again, if you’re having doubts about something and you get in with a crowd of whatever’s, then you can go really deep into that. So this relativizing effect that the internet has, but it also allows people to find a tribe that isn’t the tribe they grew up with. So the internet coming in when you’ve already got this religiously waned generation absolutely is going to accelerate some of those trends as a catalyst.

Eric Sammons:

So a Catholic 150 years ago, whatever, who’s living in their ghetto, Italian Catholics, everybody they know is Catholic, so more than likely they’re not even exposed to any doubts or anything against Catholicism, but even if they have some, let’s say they go through a period of doubts themselves, well, who are they going to talk to? Probably their parish priest about it or their parent, or their friends who are all Catholic. So eventually they’ll be like, “Okay, yeah. I’m just going to stay Catholic.”

But now they have these doubts and they get on a forum, like you said, for Bob Dylan music, whatever, and somebody says something anti-Catholic, that leads them down a rabbit hole and then all of a sudden now they can explore. But like you said, it is true that you can work the other way. In fact, there’s a postulant nun that I met recently, she’s very young and I found out she was a convert, and I said, “Well, what’s your story?” Because I think she’s only 2 or something like that right now. She said during COVID, during the lockdowns, she was like, “I’m just going look up the different Christian religions and stuff and just see denominations.” I can’t remember what she was, nondenominational. “I just want to see what they all say.”

Just by literally, as I think she was 17 or 16 or something like that when she’s doing it, on the internet she just eventually decides, “Okay, Catholicism. That’s the one.” And praise God. The algorithm usually works against us, but sometimes …

Stephen Bullivant:

The net effect is probably almost certainly a negative one, which isn’t to say that within that average there’s obviously all sorts of ways in which people become Catholic, or deepen them. I often think that a lot of my kind of Catholic support structure, my plausibility, like-minded peer groups network is friends of mine who are also Catholic on Facebook, Twitter or whatever, who I may have met in person, but not necessarily, but certainly wouldn’t see them live from year to year, and yet constantly, we’re constantly in touch. That normalizes what’s actually quite a weird thing to be in this society, which is a practicing religious entity.

Eric Sammons:

I think that’s important, because I know for my generation, I struggle with this whole, the relationships you build online. Because I remember when my kids, I have kids who are in their 20s now and down, and I remember when they first, they were in a homeschool group that was online, they interacted with people online, people in England and all over. They would meet once a year at the March for Life here in Washington DC. So to me, they were meeting these people for the first time, because they had never actually been in person with them.

So I was like, “Was it awkward when you first met … Is it going to be awkward?” They’re like, “What are you talking about, dad?” Sure enough, when they see them they immediately started hugging each other, they’re talking, just so excited to see each other. But it’s like they’ve been friends forever, because they have, even though for me, I struggle with that idea that they have been friends. But my point of this is the deep relationships you can build online, and that can go either way. So you start building deep relationships with atheists, you start building deep relationships with ex-Mormons if you’re Mormon, whatever the case may be, those are real, as much as I struggle to admit that. They are real relationships and they have a profound impact on people. So I think like you said, because the weakening already, the net impact has been negative for religion, but there have been fortunately ways it’s been encouraged as well, Catholicism and religion have been encouraged.

I want to now focus on Catholicism specifically. So we’ve talked about in general, they’re weakening after the ’60s, then the collapse in the 2000s, it’s very common in the Catholic world to pin a lot of blame on Vatican II. When I say Vatican II by the way, I mean the Vatican II event, meaning not just the documents, not just the council, but the council plus everything that happened afterwards in the name of Vatican II and the spirit of Vatican II, whatever you want to call it.

Stephen Bullivant:

The unintended consequences and everything that flows here.

Eric Sammons:

All that. So what would you say, how does Vatican II, the Vatican II event we’ll say, how does that fit into this picture? Did it help, did it hurt? Did it have no impact? How does it fit?

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah. So you’ve read Mass Exodus, so I think it’s a complicated picture. Partly, that book was motivated by these three traditions of accounting for Catholic define. One is that it’s all the council’s fault, one is that … Again, broad brush strokes, but the council was great, and it was the stifling or the suppression of the council was the fault of it. That everything’s going great and then we have these conservative crackdown popes, beginning with Humanae Vitae obviously and then everything afterwards. If we had just let the spirit flow then we wouldn’t have these problems.

Then the third one, and that’s just normal sociologists and social historians of secularization, they might talk about the Catholic story for a bit of color, but they see it very much as just a variation on the same themes. There’s no particular Catholic story to tell. Now, I was adamant partly that there’s a sense in which all of these are right, it’s a big enough pie that there’s plenty of room in it for all these different types of explanations to have some contribution to the whole. I think that there’s absolutely a Catholic story to tell, so there’s obviously bigger national level, and again, this is where it gets nebulous, but secularizing forces that play out on all the other churches as well. At different times, at different speeds, with different severity. But this isn’t just a Catholic thing.

Equally, it’s true that the Catholic rate on the one hand probably looks a bit better than certainly the mainline churches, but actually if you look at where Catholic mass going was before the council, if you look at Catholic religiosity, you can compare it to everyone else before the council, we’ve fallen a lot further to now being where everyone else is. That’s an important thing to say too I think. There’s also, it’s absolutely also the case that there was problems before the council, and I think one of my arguments is that A, this is very much the case in continental Europe. One of the reasons for the council was because there was this pastoral process brewing.

Now, what counted as a pastoral crisis in 1940s France looks like dream time compared to where we are now, not least in France. But if you read Rahner, Ratzinger, de Lubac, Congar, Danielou in the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, they’re all concerned with losing the working classes, we’re losing the youth. Rahner talks about the Christian … This is 1950s Germany, or Austria. The Christian now lives in a diaspora situation in his own family. Ratzinger talks about the new Paganism in the heart of the church that’s coming up, and this is the mid ’50s in Bavaria.

So there’s this sense of there’s this pastoral crisis that we need to do something, we need to do something about it now. Obviously when the Baby Boomers are coming of age in Britain and America, you get this same kind of thing that we’re losing the young people, we need to do something, we need to be radical, we need to do something bold or we’re going to lose them. So in a sense, one of the things I argue in Mass Exodus is that the council’s Liturgy Documents Representing Concilium is really … It opens up possibilities, and if you read the document it’s clear that it expects that the main line of post Concilium Liturgy will look really, certainly back in today’s eyes, very traditional.

There’s this expectation that it’s going to be Latin, it’s going to be plainchant, there may be some vernacular at certain times. But it opens up possibilities, it says, “Well, especially in mission territories, it’s possible to adapt things more radically, if it’s pastorally helpful, if it works.” And I do think that part of the chaos of the implementation of the council, particularly in Western Europe and America of the council, was this desperation that nothing’s really working. Young people like folk music, let’s have some of that. And of course, it was always done badly. It wasn’t like Bob Dylan and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, it was like Peter, Paul and Mary. And it was badly done, because of course it was badly done. It was like, “Who’s got a guitar? Who can come up and do this?” And it changed week on week on week on week. And then the baby boomers were the least likely people to be in any one parish for that acclimatization period because they were going off to college. They were here, there and everywhere. It’s a period when they’re not likely to be in one place at one time.

So all the pastoral craziness, by the time it settles down, isn’t the mass they were brought up with. And they’ve not been there when they got used to the new normal. So it’s not surprising that they don’t go, in the seventies, eighties. And remember that vast numbers of priests and religious left their vocations in this period, often together, often two by two. And you talk to people and they say that this was just a really serious blow to their own Catholicism when the priests and the nuns who they looked to as… Even if they had doubts sometimes, you knew that Sister Mary Athanasius didn’t, and you could kind of vicariously… She seemed to know the answers. She knew, she was solid. And then you see her in jeans and then the week after that she’s gone. That, I think, had this sense of disorientation, I think, is probably the word.

Eric Sammons:

Yeah. And I think disorientation in every way because I know, for example, my father-in-law, he would talk about how… He liked the old mass, and he was in his 30s when things started to change. And he would just show up and it would be different. He wasn’t a theological person. He was a good guy, good Catholic, believed. And then it was very disorienting. And he would always try to remain at the most “conservative” parish in town until finally there was no “conservative” parish in town, they were all doing this stuff. And it was just very disorienting for him. And now, God bless him, he remained faithful and stayed Catholic till his death, but so many of his contemporaries didn’t. And so, I’ve kind of said this, and I want you to tell me if I’m completely wrong, and so I’ll stop saying it. But I feel like Vatican II, the event, the intention behind it was sincere and solid in the sense that we are seeing some weakening, we need to do something about it.

But what they actually did, not only in general didn’t help, but it actually hurt. It made it worse than if they had done nothing. Now, I’m not saying there aren’t specific people who weren’t helped, but I mean, on an aggregate, I feel like the Vatican II event made things worse than if they had done nothing. I think if they’d done nothing, things would’ve gone downhill a lot, but I feel like things wouldn’t have gone as downhill as they did if they’d just done nothing. Do you think that’s completely out of line? Is it a possibility?

Stephen Bullivant:

No. I mean, I think that’s actually fair. I think I make a point in Mass Exodus that had there not been a council, I’d probably be writing a book about how there should have been a council, we needed a council to address these things. But I expect that what I would be counting as the terrible missed opportunities would not look as bad as what it does in terms of numbers right now. I think on of the tragedies of the council, if you had to pick… And I’m thinking particularly about liturgical reform and how it played out. There was what you might call an anthropological naivete around how it worked.

Because there was this idea that, “Well, we need to get rid of all the extras, all the accretions, all the superstitious add-ons, so we can focus on the mass. And if we don’t want people saying the rosary in church, we don’t want the tabernacle in the middle, we want to have that off at the side because it’s all about the mass.” But actually this idea that somehow someone who was at the parish every evening, sewing sequins on the dress of the Infant of Prague or anything that was going on, novenas, 40 hours devotions, that the people who were doing this were somehow less focused on Sunday. So if we get rid of all that, then Sunday will rise even greater.

And actually, it’s the opposite. What all that is is the scaffolding that holds Sunday up. And if you get rid of everything, then it’s just Sunday to Sunday. Now, there’s all sorts of reasons why that kind of rich para-liturgical life was on the wane anyway, because there was a lot more to do on midweek evenings and the baby boomer girls were not probably going to follow their mothers in whatever sodality of whatever it had been. So there’s all those sorts of changes happening anyway. But the sweeping away of the saints, of normal devotions, of statues with candles in front of them in churches… Friday abstinence is the classic case here. Even people who are seen as kind of liberal common… Andrew Greeley is not regarded as one of the of trad sociologist commentators on American Catholicism. He thinks Friday abstinence, getting rid of that was just the greatest kind of own goal; shooting yourself in the face, let alone the foot.

Eric Sammons:

I have met people, I remember talking to a man who literally left the church over that. Now, he fortunately came back before his death. But I mean, he said, because in his mind was, “The church said it’s a mortal sin to eat meat on Friday. Then all of a sudden the next day, they say, ‘It’s not a mortal sin to eat meat on Friday. Go ahead and do it if you want to.'” And to him, it’s like, “Why should I believe them about anything, then? If they’re able to say something’s a mortal…” Now, I mean, yes, theologically we can explain all that. But I’m talking about just the average person does not have that training.

They just say, “Well, if you’re going to say it’s so, when they also say at the same time that the Pope says that it’s a moral sin to use artificial contraception, but my bishop didn’t say that. My priest suggested it’s not. Well, why should I even listen to the Pope, because today you might say that, but they dropped Friday abstinence, they’re probably going to drop the artificial contraception ban one day too. And so why should I even listen to them?”

Stephen Bullivant:

I was literally about to make that link, because it’s the reason why Humanae Vitae becomes a thing. And we talk about in the wake of, the aftermath of Humanae Vitae, it’s because it’s the one thing that didn’t change. And there’s no aftermath of Casti Connubii or whatever. No one expected….The Catholic Church doesn’t change, so it’s not going to change from that. And I think the reason why Humanae Vitae was this massive thing was arguably it was the one thing that a significant proportion of the laity could happily have seen changed. And not only could everything else change, but also they’d had a couple of years of being informed by priests and bishops. And if they were following the religious press, the word on the street was that it was going to be changed.

So you’d have marriage prep telling you that, “Well, they’re going to change this,” or, “A guy I know in the Vatican says…” and all that kind of priests who were staking their authority and cred, street cred if you like, on it’s going to change. And then it didn’t. And it’s that kind of the one immovable thing that literally becomes the stumbling block. And that was, if nothing else had changed, including… And you are right about things like you look back and you think, well, why were people equating Friday abstinence with much more important moral matters? But in fact people do, because the church says that, and the reason is that the church has always said that. And there’s a better theological reason, but the immediate present reason is that, “Well, this is what we do.”

Eric Sammons:

Well, it’s an identity thing, too, because if they are ever around non-Catholics, they’re identified by the fact that they’re not eating meat on Friday. So when they go out to lunch with their coworkers on a Friday, everybody knows, “Oh yeah, George, he has to have fish, or he has to have whatever. He can’t have meat because he’s a Catholic.”

Stephen Bullivant:

I mean, my favorite anecdote here is about the McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich, which is-

Eric Sammons:

Which is from my hometown, Cincinnati. That’s where it started. And actually right down the street from where I grew up.

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah. Because a franchisee in a Catholic neighborhood was taking a massive hit in his takings every Friday. And so he creates the Filet-O-Fish, and that just wouldn’t happen afterwards. The Filet-O-Fish isn’t… I’m not a fan of the Filet-O-Fish.

Eric Sammons:

Oh, it’s awful.

Stephen Bullivant:

It’s awful.

Eric Sammons:

It’s not meat or fish, either.

Stephen Bullivant:

Exactly. But the fact that that was the great…

Eric Sammons:

That neighborhood, like I said, I grew up right in the next neighborhood. That’s a very Catholic area.

Stephen Bullivant:

Absolutely.

Eric Sammons:

Literally, the thing you asked people when you met them is, “What parish do you go to?” That was the question. And that’s where it started because that was the identifying factor. So, it seems like, from what you’re saying, I feel like the church leaders recognized there’s a weakening going on. I’m talking about 1960s. Fifties, sixties, there’s this weakening going on. But I feel like, for example, you mentioned how the boomer kid girls, a lot of them wouldn’t have been interested in the sodalities and things like that, and doing the dresses for the Infant of Prague and stuff like that. But I feel like what the church’s response to that was… There’s three different responses you could have.

One is you go harder into against it. Go uber Catholic, we’re going to go more into it. Another is you take some of it, you don’t take other parts of it, and you kind of adapt it. But I feel like what they did was the third, which is, “We’re going to lean into it. Okay, the girls aren’t going to join sodality? We’re going to abolish the sodality stuff. The kids don’t really like Mass? They’re kind of confused by the Latin in Mass? We’re going to completely abolish Mass in Latin. They like this music? We’re going to completely embrace this music in the Mass.” And I feel like they just went completely in on it. I don’t know if the first or second are the right answer, but I feel like we’ve got pretty good evidence that the third was not the right answer, of just going into it. Does that make sense?

Stephen Bullivant:

No, I think that’s right. I make a chess analogy, which is – I don’t go for a sports analogy – this kind of queen sacrifice. If it works, it’s like this glorious sacrifice that led to the… If it fails, then it’s catastrophic. And I think that there’s an element of that. I think one of the things is that if you had to pick a moment in the past, I don’t know, however many centuries, if you had to pick a decade to do some pastoral experimentation, where you wanted the nearest thing to social laboratory conditions where all other things being equal, let’s make some changes and see what the effects are. The 1960s, anywhere, but in America particularly, is the one decade that you’d avoid, where everything’s changing, everything’s going to change.

So to be messing around with key bits of Catholic practice and identity and belief at a time when everything else is changing partly means that you can always blame anything that goes wrong on something else. You can always say, “Oh, well, it wasn’t the liturgical changes that didn’t produce the fruits we expected, it was the other things going on at the same time.” And then you often hear this about Vatican II is that you can’t blame the council for the decline because, A, there was problems beforehand, which is true. But also there’s all these other factors that are affecting all those other churches that didn’t have a ecumenical council in the 1960s, which is also true. But the reason why, and if you read the first paragraphs of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the council is called because they recognize those problems, and it’s called to address those problems. And it lays out some pretty clear, what you might call key performance indicators of how you know the reform has done the reforming, how you know that it’s worked, because it’s about pastoral efficaciousness.

I mean, what you can say is that imagine how much worse it would be had it not been for the council. And with every passing year that’s become more and more implausible because how much worse could it be 50 years later? I mean, but it’s sad that we’re getting to that point when you think, well, honestly, how much worse could not having had a council be at this point? Which isn’t to say that there’s a third option of a differently timed, a differently implemented, a differently done reform, which is probably the best option. But I think that’s absolutely fair.

Eric Sammons:

The fact is that if you read what the bishops at the time were saying, I read a book, writing between Evelyn Waugh and the Cardinal.

Stephen Bullivant:

Yes. We quote that in the very short introduction. Yeah.

Eric Sammons:

And there’s this promise. I can’t remember, what was the cardinal’s name? I can’t remember. I think it was in Westminster, but I can’t remember his name.

Stephen Bullivant:

Heenan.

Eric Sammons:

Oh yeah, Heenan. Right. And he has this sincere belief, it seemed, at least that’s how I interpreted it, looking at his letters, that if we just trust what the Vatican is saying, the committee on the liturgy and all this stuff, it will make people come back. I think he sincerely was like, “Hey, people are leaving. We need to do this to get them to come back. And Evelyn Waugh, who was right, actually, was like, “No, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

And I just feel like there’s a certain tragedy and sadness when you read that. Because I think a lot of the bishops of the time, they really felt like, “Yes, we got to do something.” And it’s almost like – okay, I didn’t want to get too political – but you know how when you have a crisis in… it’s like, “We got to do something.” And it’s leads to panic and you just do everything and usually it makes it worse. And I feel like that’s almost what they did back then. It was like, “We have to do something. People are leaking out, young people particularly, so let’s do it.”

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah. Well, Heenan actually agrees with Waugh about a lot of stuff.

Eric Sammons:

He does, yes.

Stephen Bullivant:

But you’re right that there’s this “My hands are tied” kind of thing. And he’s bitching, privately, bitching about all the chaos that’s happening as well.

Eric Sammons:

Yeah. I feel like he’s saying-

Stephen Bullivant:

He’s the Archbishop of Westminster.

Eric Sammons:

“We have to trust what they’re saying, even though my gut tells me it’s wrong. Your gut, Waugh, tells you it’s wrong. But we just have to go along with it because that’s what they’re saying and I guess it will work.”

Stephen Bullivant:

And one of the sources that I loved reading for writing the very short introduction was the council diary of Bishop Marion Forst of Dodge City, Kansas, which is just a brilliant book. Not one of the major players, he’s just one of the bit part people, commenting his thoughts throughout the council. But he talks about how he’ll spend all this time at the council and then he’ll go back to his diocese in the off season and then have his priests tell him what’s happening at the council.

And he’s like, “Dudes, that’s literally not what the council is saying or what’s happening or what’s being talked about.” But there’s this kind of runaway effect of this kind of what the council is intending, meaning that only grows after the council. And then obviously, I mean, we’ve not even talked about doctrine and catechesis, but you don’t get a catechism until the nineties. So there’s this period where you’ve got competing accounts of what the councilors taught on various issues.

Eric Sammons:

Yeah, things like the Dutch catechism.

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah, exactly. And then there’s this whole new catachetical style. So people argue that we’ve got this lost generation who were never properly categorized, which, again, is probably true. But again, there was this sense in which you couldn’t use the old catechisms because they were now out of date. But we didn’t have anything new that was actually solid until the best part of 30 years later.

Eric Sammons:

Now, I knew this was going to happen, that we’re going to go longer than normal. I hope you can stay because I have one I want to address today, like what do we do today? What is working now? One of the things, I have mentioned numerous times, I actually did a survey of this for Crisis, and that is the rise of the Latin mass communities. That if you look at the numbers just objectively, most places in the West – I’m talking about America, Western Europe, Canada, things like that – you see a huge decrease in numbers in Catholic parishes.

But we’re also seeing an increase, a pretty dramatic increase, especially in the past couple years, with the Latin mass communities. And we could go into, but we’re not going to, Pope Francis’s response and all that stuff. But my question is, do you think that is something that would be the answer, or a answer, that could be widespread? Or do you think it’s more a matter of simply the few Catholics that are left, they are more likely to embrace such a thing, and so a lot of them are leaving their Novus Ordo kind of wishy-washy parish for the Latin mass, and it’s really more that than anything else. Where would you say that it ranks in all that?

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah, I mean, first of all, we used to go to the Latin mass when there was one. We live in a town that’s got a big parish church, and there just happened to be a tiny church that was built in the early 19th century in this tiny little village that was the Catholic landowner, and it was before Catholicism was legally emancipated or whatever, which is a whole other story. And the parish priest, he did the liturgy well, whenever he did the liturgy, but we did a traditional Latin mass at noon on a Sunday. And it’s about 20 minutes drive. So we used to go there, and there was reasons why we went there. I mean, I liked the liturgy. The demographics of the Latin mass community is there’s lots of kids. So the kids liked the kids. And also noon was a good time, so this was perfect.

So we used to go there. We were still members of our own parish, kids went to the parish school, still do. But we’d go there. And then that parish gets… The parish priest, not because of this, just moves. That parish gets served from our parish. The Latin mass is no longer done. Latin mass is now a further drive away, in the evening, which doesn’t work with small children and that kind of stuff. So we’ve stopped going. Now, we have friends who will drive an hour and a half, two hours, at whatever time, with a van full of kids. And God love them, that’s the kind of commitment, and that’s the kind of parish community you want.

But that’s not us. That’s not us. So I think one of the great things about the Latin mass folk, and I consider myself one, and we talked about this before, given everything else that’s going on, all the kind of waned thing, the shaky parish, all sorts of stuff, looking to the future, we know the importance of social networks for religious commitment. So if you hang out with other equally religious people, you are likely to stay more religious yourself. It’s because we’re social animals. Benedict talked about this in Caritas in Veritate, I think. No, in whatever the first encyclical of Francis was that Benedict started.

Eric Sammons:

Oh, right. I remember that one. I liked it. And I was like, oh, wow new encyclical. Then I realized Benedict’s people had actually written it.

Stephen Bullivant:

So it’s that one. So anyway, so what you want is that given that to be a young committed Catholic is pretty rare. Actually what we want is to get all those ones together. Because what you don’t want is to thin them out over the parishes so they’re the only ones so they just get assimilated into the normal thing. You actually, strategically, you want the committed ones to, at least some of the time, gather together with the other committed ones. So that becomes the kind of the normal pig. And for the kids, you want them to hang out with other kids for whom mass and prayer at bedtime is normal. It might be boring, but it’s a thing that other kids, you also have to do. It’s a normal thing.

Now, the traditional Latin mass community is a good example of this. Syro-Malabar, Eastern Catholics are another good example of this. There’ll be all sorts of… Polish language. I’m just talking about our context here in Britain. There’s certain kind of niche liturgical communities where you’re going to see similar dynamics in play. And it could be charismatics going to a gathering at a particular church for particular reasons. But the kinds of people who are going to travel to it for a particular liturgical offering are going to be pretty hardcore and they’re going to be in a room full of people who are pretty hardcore. And that’s what you want.

Now I think in this country at least and whatever things might be like in individual dioceses or country, I don’t know. I never saw and I’m not saying that there aren’t problem trad communities who are basically schismatics and aren’t doing whatever. And obviously you see a lot more of this online than you do actually if you go to the Latin mass. It’s not that there aren’t, there’s spectrum of theological and political views in any congregation.

The Latin mass communities that I’ve been to in Britain or America seem like exactly the sorts of thing that any bishop and any Vatican would be wanting to foster as part of the ecosystem. It’s not for everyone. I’m really not one of these people who think that if we came back to the Latin mass, all the problems that be solved. I think in a sense the loss of all that 50 years ago means that unless it grows organically over a long period of time by gathered communities for whom this is normal, who then get the opportunity to have that as their ongoing formation when they have their kids and that kind of stuff. Like the Eastern Catholic churches do, ideally. I don’t think that if we all suddenly went… I think we’d have this kind of massive crisis again, because that’s not people’s mass and people don’t like change.

And now the people who are there are used to something suddenly changing it in any big way. It just isn’t going to work. And now that’s not to say that there isn’t… And this is the great thing that Benedict had. Benedict had this idea was like, well, there’s certain people who want this. And a spiritually nourished by… Which I think is actually a very kind of Vatican too view, is that there’s certain liturgical configurations that are more or less pastorally efficacious with certain groups. And the Latin rite is big enough to accommodate these differences.

And that seemed to me to be a very healthy view. And it also allowed this idea of the cross fertilization of, so you get a lot of Novus Ordo priests who celebrate ad orientem, for example, which is a kind of a retro move. Or they’ll have a bit of Latin in there or they’ll do certain things. And that seems to be quite a healthy bringing together the two worlds for a time. I think the crackdown on it is whatever the problem was or is in certain places, the solution is a pastoral disaster and just cruel actually.

Eric Sammons:

Yeah. That’s a good word.

Stephen Bullivant:

It’s a time when almost any group of committed Catholics ought to be cherished and nurtured, let alone ones that are having lots of kids who all love… People who love the Catholic faith. And it seems a crazy, purely on a pastoral, forget about theology, forget about liturgical history or whatever. Purely looked at kind of strategically pastorally. It’s crazy.

Eric Sammons:

Yeah, it is. It kind of brings me to one thing I wanted to bring up, which is the response. How should Catholics today respond to this? Not just Catholics, but Christians, religious to the decline and you bring it up in Nonverts near the end as you present almost two different categories of response from practicing Christians of what to do. One is, I think you call it, exile and place quiet kind of the Benedict option. The, okay, let’s hunker down and keep the faith in our community, keep the faith and pass it on to our kids and wait for a better day, so to speak. Almost like St. Benedict, as Rod Dreher suggested did through the dark ages.

And then the other, which I know you had a difficult time, I think finding a name for it, I think at one point you call it like MAGA Christianity, just the idea that we go out there and that the first options for wimps and for defeatists and whatnot. And I see this online all the time where you see two people who are both devoted practicing Catholics who love the Lord and want the church to succeed. One will be of the more Benedict option other will be the more of the MAGA Christianity and, boy, they really can go at it. And so the idea of the MAGA Christianity is more the we got to fight and we got to retake the culture type of thing. Do you think one has more possibility for success? Are they both kind of doomed for failure? I know I have a preference, but I will not reveal it at this point, but what would you say?

Stephen Bullivant:

I mean I think Ben Benedict option properly understood and actually if you read the book, I mean you see this kind of stereotyped as Catholic Amish or Jonestown kind of bunker communities, which if you read the book, he’s like saying, hey, there’s this suburb outside Washington DC where all the Catholic families in a few blocks meet for barbecues every Sunday. It’s that kind of leaning into things that we know work. And one of the things that we know works is hanging out with other committee like-minded others.

So if I hang out with other massive Bob Dylan fans, I’m going to go deeper and deeper into that rabbit hole. And when I used to spend my time online hanging out with serious Bob Dylan fans, I was collecting the bootleg recordings of every show. It was a normal thing to not just go to a show on a tour, but to try and go to all the shows on the tour and that kind of thing. You’re not hanging out with that kind of group of extremists then you just have a much more kind of normal way of doing it. If you hang out with people for whom the faith is a serious part of their lives, and then that helps you be someone for whom the faith is a serious part of your life, and you in turn are part of their mutually supporting plausibility structure networks. Their kind of tribe, their kind of crowd.

So I think mean there’s a sense in which the Benedict option isn’t simply let’s hunker down and wait for things to change. It’s actually the best thing we can do to help things change given the situation we’re in, isn’t going to suddenly be turned around barring some miraculous intervention anytime soon. So the critical thing is to keep the faith to the next generation. To have this kind of seriously, intellectually formed Catholic subculture where, yes, we’re attracting a few of the other weirdos in the wider culture who want to join us, and I’m one of those.

But also, and again, it’s going to be very difficult. It’s an uphill battle, but if you have enough kids and you do your best to raise them in the faith, then you’re going to gain the odds in raising at least some of them to then be the next generation of committed Catholics who will raise their kids and that kind of thing. So it’s almost a kind of a classic minority religion strategy invert. This is like what Jews did in the diaspora for centuries, millennia. I mean, again, but by no means that makes it sound like we’re some… I’m certainly not making analogies to persecuted, but for any kind of community that in a sense the hand we are dealt is to do what we can now that puts us in a stronger position in the next generation than it would be if we didn’t do these things essentially.

Eric Sammons:

Yeah, and I actually agree with everything you just said because I kind of lean… I think the Benedict options often misunderstood what Dreher was trying to say. And I think, for example, we go to a Latin mass parish, we homeschool our kids. Actually our parish also celebrates the Novus Ordo, but we go to the Latin mass there, we homeschool our kids. And so that alone, our kids watch Veggie Tales. So therefore that alone makes it that we’re living out what he was saying with the Benedict option because we’re living a counterculture, but we still go to baseball games. It’s not like we’re not Amish. I mean, I got nothing at the Amish by the way. God bless them.

But at the same time, we’re not doing that either. We’re still in the world on some level, but we are more out of the world, I would say, than, for example, my wife’s parents were when they were raising their kids in the sixties and seventies by the very fact that that’s just the way it is. That the surrounding culture is so much less Christian, anti-Christian, even anti-God that this is the way it has to be.

So my last question I want to ask you was, you’ve interviewed a lot of people who have left the faith, and there’s a lot of parents, Catholic parents who are listening to this watching us, what advice from seeing how these kids have left, what would you say to parents who want their kids not to leave, I mean, would it be that be in a community like you just said? Or is there some advice you would give that what you mean you’ve seen what doesn’t work that could work, that parents could do?

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah, I think first of all, you can do everything right and still end up with kids who leave. I talked to a lot of parents who say literally we did everything. We love our kids. Our kids are great, we love their partners, but the great sadness is that the kids, they aren’t baptized and aren’t taken to mass and that kind of stuff. And you can do everything right and that still happens. And that’s just the hand we’re dealt now.

The things that we do know help gain the odds, and we really are talking about on the average, is the sorts of things that increase the likelihood of any one person growing up to be a religiously committed adult, is religious practice in the home growing up. And that’s not just going to church on a Sunday. It’s things like praying before meals. It’s things like hanging out with other Catholic, whatever, Catholic in this instance family is. It’s this kind of intentional religiosity. There’s plenty of people who were raised like that who have left. That’s true, but on the average that helps, you sometimes hear it’s like, well you don’t want to raise them too religious because then they always rebel. And it’s like, well actually some do. But the average is that it is much better odds than not doing that.

I mean, the other thing mean there’s this kind of balance between being… Different families, and especially depending on where you were, are going to draw the cultural distinctiveness differently. Do you send them to the public school or the Catholic school? Do you homeschool? Do you only watch EWTN? Do you only watch whatever? Do you actually think that what the church needs is culturally conversant normal people who were also very deeply rooted in the faith, which actually I think the church does need. It’s that kind of balance. And there’s no silver bullet. There’s no, here’s this one weird trick that kind of solves the problem.

But I mean the basics really, and maybe the basics are what we lost after the council. Praying, novenas, saints, all those sorts of things. A social life, it doesn’t have to be about churchy stuff, but if you’re hanging out, if you’re playing football with other churchy people, if you just do normal things, but that’s your social group, that helps. And actually megachurch is again, not a silver bullet that evangelicalism compared to our numbers are doing better because they kind of gained that system in a certain sense.

Eric Sammons:

Yeah, I think that’s great advice. I really do think that is because it’s a lot of times triads are attacked because you just want to go back to the 1950s. And really it’s more a matter of, I just think that things like Eucharistic processions, doing novenas at a church, praying, the rosaries of family, having meatless Fridays, all these things are little points of contact with the faith that do help pass it on.

Not a hundred percent but better than if you don’t do them. And so it’s like, so we want to do those, but they’re good in themselves, obviously something like procession stuff is good in itself. But from a parish’s perspective, I also know that they do help deepen that connection. I remember Cardinal Dolan wrote about this years ago about the Catholic identity markers like meatless Fridays and ashes on your forehead on Ash Wednesday and stuff like that. They really do help pass on the faith. So we should make sure with our kids we do those things. So it doesn’t guarantee it, like you said, but it does game the odds a little bit in our favor.

Stephen Bullivant:

There is a spectrum. You talked about the Amish, I mean the Amish do a great job at keeping people. The Amish, shall I talk about this in the book, high birth rate and keeping most of them Amish. The Amish keep doubling about every 20 years. I mean, there comes a point when we’ll all be Amish, I mean, if the trends continue. But that’s obviously a particular choice that certainly isn’t… We are called to be in the world, but not of the world kind of thing. There’s obviously a spectrum from that to full cultural and then actually becoming… One of the things that I think is critical in all of this is even what the day before yesterday were just kind of normal, mainstream positions of becoming more and more deeply countercultural, especially on life issues. And actually any kind of holding to these is going to be marking you off from the wider culture.

Eric Sammons:

You just have to deal with it. Okay. Yeah, I’m going to let you go here because I’ve taken a lot of your time. I really appreciate it. I could go on forever, but I want to encourage people to get your books, the Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America, that that’s your latest and it’s excellent. In fact, I won’t say who it is, but I recently talking to a very influential Catholic person in this country, we’ll just say that and I told him, you got to get this book. And he literally pulled out his phone and he bought it right there in that moment.

Stephen Bullivant:

You’ll have to tell me who that is after we are finished…in secret.

Eric Sammons:

Yeah, I will. But I also recommend Mass Exodus. Mass Exodus. When did this come out? A couple years ago, right? Like two or three years ago, something like that. 2019. So this is excellent for Catholics especially. I highly recommend both of them. And then why don’t you tell us, I think you’re working on another book on Vatican Two or something?

Stephen Bullivant:

Vatican Two, a very short introduction is out now. So it’s literally due out, it’s certainly come out in the UK, it’ll be out in the states. Amazon will tell you, but certainly within the next month or two.

Eric Sammons:

Okay. I’m sure it’ll be great then. Okay. And where can people find out about you? Twitter, do you have a website?

Stephen Bullivant:

Yeah, if you Google me, Stephen—with a PH—Bullivant you’ll find me. I’m on Twitter @ssbullivant. But I’m pretty easy to find if you want to.

Eric Sammons:

Very good, very good. Okay, well thank you very much again. I appreciate you coming on for this great discussion.

Stephen Bullivant:

Pleasure.

Eric Sammons:

Okay everybody, until next time, God love you!

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